Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 11 June 2018

14 OUTLOOK 11 June 2018 Manoj Prabhakar secretly recorded audio of chats to fix cricket matches. Stung: Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and others. All cleared after initial bans from cricket. Prabhakar also probed. Operation West End: Tehelka ‘Arms dealer’ offered cash to politicians, babus Stung: politicos, defence officials. Def Min Fernandes resigned; Bangaru Laxman convicted Witness Tampering: NDTV A reporter assumes a disguise, changes his/her identity and goes undercover with hidden cameras. The danger, the thrill, the wide range of possibilities sound very romantic and at the same time raise concerns. Is it ethical journalism? Is it only just feeding into voyeurism for which there is a wait- ing audience? Should conversations caught surreptitiously on tape or cam- era later be made public? The latest debate has sprung from the two-part Operation 136, released by the investigative journalism outfit Cobrapost.com. The first part, targeting 17 media houses, was released during a press conference on March 26 and dominated social media conversations for days. Cobrapost’s press release lays out the way in which journalist Pushp Sharma assumed an undercover identity, ‘Acharya Atal’, and went about with a fictitious assignment of buying space for advertorials and planting news stories in various media outlets with an aim to polarise communities and manipulate elections. The second part shows the operation conducted on 27 other organisations and has created more ripples as those allegedly stung include some big media houses. Some of the people recorded talk of a compromised relationship with poli ticians while being baited by the underc over reporter. Many say they are willing to accept cash and some even describe the mechanism of cash payments to buy space. The notable exceptions are Dainik Samwad and the Bengali daily Bartaman. In fact, the latter’s marketing head gives Sharma a lecture on ethics when he raises the stakes tenfold to Rs 10 crore. Investigative journalism is put on trial every time a sting operation is unleashed on the viewer, a fix better than prime time TV debates. Media critic Sevanti Ninan points out the nuances surrounding journalistic endeavours that use hidden cameras. “A hidden camera recording an ongoing process is different from this situation, which is entrapment where you go with a ficti- tious proposition and a camera. This is problematic because it only proves that they are open to enticements. Tehelka’s Operation West End (2001) amounted to the same approach. Nevertheless, Match fixing: Tehelka Recorded senior advocate trying to bribe and manipulate witness Stung: R.K. Anand. Apologised after conviction for contempt of court, barred temporarily from practice and stripped of designation. by Ushinor Majumdar STING IN TAIL The Truth: Gujarat 2002: Tehelka Posed as author asking alleged rioters about post-Godhra violence Stung: Babu Bajrangi, others accused in riots. Footage helped convict Bajrangi. Secret Handshak Journalism or sensationalism? Cobrapost’s sting operation when you approach people with a fic- titious proposition, it does reveal their predilection for wrongdoing,” she says. This week, Al Jazeera released its sting operation on cricket. It used a ruse and hidden cameras, just as in Operation 136, to approach fixers and compromised officials. It revealed that a pitch had been tampered with in an India-Sri Lanka international Test match. It also showed that Dawood Ibrahim may still be pulling the strings of match-fixing in cricket and continues to run a betting racket in India. Is this exposing the rot in the system, or is it unethical journalism? “In the current scenario, if we had the money, we would have got all the diabolical things we suggested published in mainstream media. Isn’t that scary? You could not have done it on open cameras. If senior management and owners are going to sell their editorial space for big money, our democracy is in danger whatever else some media pundits might suggest,” says Aniruddha Bahal of Cobrapost. But the danger in this kind of ope ration is that it can quickly turn into plain blackmailing. “The issue is who does the sting. After the first couple of big stings, it became an enterprise. People set up small outfits and offered to sting people for money, and TV channels began to outsource stings,” says Ninan. Media commentator and Newslaundry editor Madhu Trehan points out that sting operations cre- ated a cottage industry of blackmail after Operation West End. “Tehelka’s Operation West End was the biggest of

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